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by Mira Grant

  Audrey wasn’t our chef: She was our Fictional, the third arm of our unbalanced tripod. She wrote hard-boiled pre-Rising crime sagas, following a group of fictional detectives through a series of seedy underworlds and dockside dives. She had a good following, and stood out from the pack by eschewing romance in favor of brutal murders and quippy one-liners. Her most popular detective, Li “Lethal” Jiang, had been optioned by a small film studio, and was now appearing in a series of direct-to-download serials. And oh, how the money rolled in. Audrey could have bought her own place, hung her hat with any blog site in the country, and she stayed with us in our weird little collective, where we all took turns doing the chores, and someone else was always in the downstairs bathroom. It was a nonsensical choice on her part.

  Love makes us do stupid shit sometimes. Audrey settled next to me at the table, bumping her shoulder against mine. I grinned at her around my spoon.

  Audrey joined our blogging team a year after Ben and I got married. I fell in love instantly, which led to some serious “this is a bad romantic comedy masquerading as my life” complications when she realized that I was flirting with her. She was smart, pretty, accomplished, and knew how to make the best potato leek soup I’d ever tasted: I never stood a chance. She, on the other hand, had some fairly strong objections to dating a married woman. When Ben and I had first sat down with her to explain the nature of our relationship, she had thought it was some sort of cruel joke. Then, slowly, she had come to understand the facts—why we had married, why we had stayed married, and why it was important that we look married, at least in the eyes of the INS.

  And then she had kissed me in the hallway as we were on our way to our respective rooms, and I had been well and truly fucked.

  In public, the three of us were poly, Ben married to me and dating Audrey, me married to him and dating her, her dating the both of us and smiling serenely when anyone commented on how she was a home-wrecker. It was a pretty fiction. If I’d been even slightly interested in boys, or if Audrey had felt that way about Ben, it might have worked out. As it was, we were still keeping it up now that I had my citizenship, waiting for… I don’t even know. For the right time. For Ben’s mother to die. For me to stop worrying about being deported. For something.

  If I was being honest, most of the waiting had been on my part. Audrey had made her intentions toward me clear ages ago, and was just waiting for me to catch up.

  Mat scrunched up their nose, looking at their laptop. “Well, damn,” they said, with deep frustration.

  I looked up. “Can’t scrub the sound?”

  “What do I look like, an amateur? I’ve already scrubbed the sound. It’s in your in-box, ready to upload. All I needed to do was isolate that dispatcher’s voice, and that was half done before you hung up the phone. No. It’s the Ryman campaign.”

  Everyone went quiet.

  Senator Peter Ryman was the golden boy of the Republican Party. He was also young enough to believe in freedom of the press. His campaign was trying to be “edgy” and “modern” by bringing their own blog team along for his run at the White House.

  “What about it?” asked Ben cautiously. Mat had been a big advocate for us putting our applications in, which had required a lot of paperwork: proof of our license status, proof of our firearms training, and in my case, consent to a deep background check by the Ryman team, since I had only recently become a U.S. citizen. If they had found anything they didn’t like, they could have contested my naturalization—and since my commitment was a part of my record, I’d been on pins and needles until our applications were filed.

  “We didn’t get it.” Mat looked so morose that it was all I could do not to bust out laughing. It’s not nice to mock the pain of others, but the fact was, none of us had been banking on this opportunity the way Mat had. Sure, it would have been nice to spend a few months basking in the limelight of someone else’s problem, and the ratings would have been incredible—we could have done all the house renovations we had to keep putting off—but we’d never really been in the running. An Irish expatriate, a black man, a lesbian, and a techie who didn’t want to be nailed down to a gender? Not the sort of thing that says “we’ll sell you to the masses” to a political campaign.

  “Sorry, Mat,” said Ben. “Any idea who did?”

  “Give me a second.” Mat settled in to type, ignoring the soup cooling by their elbow. I calmly leaned across the table and pulled the bowl to me. Audrey looked amused. I shrugged. If Mat wasn’t going to eat it, there was no sense letting it go to waste.

  “You know, it’s probably good that we didn’t get it,” said Audrey. “I mean, we would have been following the Republicans. Can you imagine them trying to deal with us? It would have been a disaster of epic proportions.”

  “Disasters make the news,” said Ben.

  “How many Irwins are at this table?” asked Audrey. “One. One person at this table intentionally and voluntarily puts herself in danger for the amusement of others. I don’t want to be the news, ever. I want to live a long, happy, peaceful life, figure out how to oil paint so that it doesn’t look like dog poop on canvas, and maybe see China one day. Becoming the news gets you dead.”

  “Or it gets you famous,” said Mat. “Okay, get this. The winning team hasn’t been announced yet, but Georgette Meissonier just cancelled her attendance at all local events and locked down her group’s firewall, and Georgia Mason has resigned from Bridge Supporters.”

  I straightened. Shaun and Georgia Mason were journalistic royalty. Their parents had survived the Rising and become two of the world’s first fully accredited Internet journalists. Stacy Mason had virtually written the book on what it was to be an Irwin, and her son had followed in her footsteps. No one took a risk like Shaun Mason. No one took a hit like him, either. We’d been on a few of the same group expeditions. I’d flirted with him because the cameras loved it, and he’d flirted back with exactly the same level of interest—the sort of thing that turned off like a switch had been flipped as soon as the cameras stopped rolling. He was a consummate professional, and everyone who knew his sister said she was even colder and more wrapped up in her work.

  “If they were submitting an application, why did we bother?” I asked. “They probably got it on the strength of their family name alone. They didn’t have to try.”

  “Come on, Ash. They’re people like anybody else. I bet they have the same problems we do.” Audrey leaned over to rest her head against my shoulder. Her shampoo smelled like apples. “This would have been a great opportunity for anybody. You can’t blame them for trying.”

  “I can blame them for anything I like, but since I didn’t want this opportunity anyway, I am choosing to take the high ground and say I hope they will have a wonderful time,” I said primly.

  Audrey laughed. “Good girl.”

  “Please, stop,” said Mat, in a monotone. “The cuteness is toxic and will destroy me. Stop, stop, stop.” They looked up from the laptop and frowned. “Wait, where did my soup go?”

  This time, Audrey wasn’t the only one laughing. Sure, we didn’t get the gig of a lifetime, but it didn’t matter. There would be other gigs, other opportunities to show what we could do. Our collective was getting stronger all the time. One day soon, the world would know what we could do. We would find a way.

  The soup was delicious, and the conversation around the table quickly devolved into the usual post-op chatter: how to cut the reports, how to describe the situation well enough to make it thrilling without making it seem exaggerated or unrealistic. People who’d never been in a field situation were always happy to say it couldn’t have happened that way, even when there was video footage available. Saying the footage hadn’t been doctored didn’t help; unless you got incredibly lucky with your raw take, everything was doctored in some way. A good techie would adjust the light levels, filter the sound, even stabilize the camera after the fact to make the action clearer and easier to understand. All good things, except for the part where it
meant that digging into the file’s metadata would inevitably find evidence of tampering. There was no clean video in the world anymore. Hell, some cameras tampered as a matter of course, which meant their footage was automatically inadmissible in court.

  Audrey eventually excused herself to go upstairs and get to work on her latest Lethal Jiang adventure. It was my night to do the washing up, and so I tied an apron around my waist and got to work while Mat and Ben kept arguing about the best way to intercut the pan shots of the area that I’d taken while he was inside the funeral home. It was a pleasant backdrop to the slosh of running water and the clatter of silverware. This was what home was meant to sound like.

  Neither of them looked up when I called good night and made for the door. They were sunk in their own little world, the pair of them, and they wouldn’t surface until they’d negotiated the best use of our limited video. I wasn’t concerned. I knew I’d get all the juicy action shots, the man moaning in the field and the hands reaching to pull us down from the statue’s head. I’d even get the jittery, bouncing footage taken during the climb. I could craft a fabulous narrative from that, and let Ben have the dry, boring bits about civic responsibility and crumbling infrastructure—the sort of thing that got the older generation’s engines revving, as they continued to think of the world as something we could reclaim one day, and not just something to survive. He looked at zombies and saw a walking metaphor for man’s inhumanity to man. I saw zombies. I liked it that way.

  Audrey was propped up on pillows in the bed when I slipped into the room. She looked up and smiled, her reading glasses resting on the end of her nose and her tablet balanced on her knee. “They down there burning the house down?”

  “Not tonight,” I said, reaching behind me to unzip my sundress. It fell to the floor in a puddle. I stooped to retrieve it and hung it over the edge of the laundry basket, making my motions slow and deliberate, aware of how closely Audrey was watching me.

  By the time I’d finished undressing and pulled my nightgown on, Audrey’s glasses and tablet had somehow found their way to the nightstand. She reached for me, smiling. I came to her, and we came together, and for a little while, the world was reduced to the two of us. Nothing more, nothing less.

  Eventually, we slept.

  Audrey woke before I did, as was her wont; she was sitting up in the bed, glasses back on her nose, tablet back on her knee, when I rolled over and opened my eyes. “Good morning, sleepy girl,” she said. “It is currently eight thirty Pacific Standard Time. It’s Mat’s turn to make breakfast, so I suggest cereal. And Ben is going to drag you out of here by your foot if you don’t get up and get your report online within the next hour.”

  “Good morning to you too.” I rubbed my face with one hand, yawning. “How did we get a deadline?”

  Wordlessly, Audrey turned her tablet so I could see. The chat function was on, and a line of messages ran all the way down the right-hand side of the screen. All of them were from Ben. They had started at seven o’clock, and grew increasingly urgent as time passed. By the time I caught up to the present, he was yelling in all-caps, demanding she pour ice water over my head and questioning her devotion to something called “Sparklemotion,” which was always his go-to when he was really pissed off. My friends are weird.

  “Okay, okay, I’ll get up.” I rolled over again, this time so I could swing my feet around to the floor. As usual, my body protested every action. Some Irwins train themselves to wake in an instant, going from cool slumber to battle-readiness without missing a beat. I hate those people. I am a slow, bleary creature when I wake up, like a bear struggling out of hibernation. If I ever woke to zombies in my bedroom, I would be a dead woman.

  It was different in the field. In the field, I was more like an exemplar of my profession, powered by adrenaline and energy drinks, rarely stopping for longer than it took to back up my files and run back into the bush. I just slowed down at home, dropping my guard and allowing myself to catch up on all the sleep I didn’t get when I was working.

  I stood, removing my robe from the floor and slipping it on. Even that seemed like too much effort for this uncaring hour of the morning. Audrey, who had probably been awake well before Ben started messaging her, watched with tolerant amusement. I blew her a kiss and slipped out of the room. Time to take care of the necessities, before my darling husband decided to beat my head in with his laptop.

  The house we shared was technically big enough for eight if we went by the number of bedrooms available, and not by how many people we could stand sharing living space with. Despite that, there were only three bathrooms, which was a large part of what defined our normal cap. It was hard to like anyone very much when they were between me and the vital necessity of peeing.

  Ben had the master bedroom, naturally, since it was his house. Audrey and I were down the hall, in the space between the office I shared with Ben and the room we used as Audrey’s art studio. Mat slept on the ground floor, surrounded by rooms filled with buzzing equipment and endless dry-erase boards. The last bedroom was maintained for guests, and had been decorated by Ben’s mother, who’d always insisted the rest of us had no idea what “welcoming” looked like to a normal person. Maybe she was right. I didn’t really know. Her selections had been pleasant and non-offensive and reminded me so much of the institution that I’d never been able to spend more than a few minutes in that room before I had to flee.

  Ben was sitting at the kitchen table when I came down the stairs. He looked up at the sound of footsteps. Then he actually slapped the wood. “Did you take a sleeping pill or something? I was starting to think you were dead up there.”

  “Don’t be silly, Benny-boy,” I said, walking past him to the fridge. “There would have been screaming if I’d died in the night. You know Audrey doesn’t sleep armed.” A point of loud and frequent dissent between us. I loved her very much. That didn’t mean I slept next to her without a gun close at hand, in case the worst happened. She said she loved me too much to think that way. Some nights I couldn’t sleep for fear that my heart would stop in the night, and I would reanimate and eat her.

  “Don’t call me Benny,” grumbled Ben, refocusing on his laptop.

  That wasn’t like him. Well, the objection to the nickname was like him—was exactly like him, in fact—but the grumbling and the glaring were unusual. I paused in the process of fishing the orange juice out of the fridge, turning to give him a thoughtful, narrow-eyed look. “Something wrong?”

  “The news about the Masons is all over the blogosphere,” said Ben. He was glaring at his screen. “The story we got yesterday was good. It was like a last gift from my mama. And now we can’t get any damn traction, because all the aggregators care about is sucking up to the golden children before they decide who’s going to get their stories.”

  “Joke’s on them, mate,” I said, closing the fridge. “Nobody’s going to get those stories.”

  Ben raised an eyebrow as he turned to face me again. At least he didn’t look mad anymore. He was always easier to deal with when he wasn’t railing against the injustices of the world. “Explain.”

  “You’ve met Georgia Mason, yeah?” I carried the orange juice over to the table and sat. When Ben nodded, I said, “And I’ve met Shaun. He’s a professional, and he tries to play it private, but there’s a few things he can’t hide. He loves his sister. He loves his work. He hates his parents.”

  Ben blinked. “But… they’re the Masons,” he said, sounding confused.

  I swallowed the impulse to sigh. Ben had been raised by a doting mother and a loving older sister, both of whom had wanted nothing but the best for him. In a weird way, he’d had a sheltered life. Add the fact that Stacy and Michael Mason were celebrities, thanks to their place in the hierarchy of the news, and it shouldn’t have been a surprise that he was confused when I said Shaun hated them. Somehow, it still was. Ben and I had been married for years, and we’d been friends even longer, but I kept expecting his naiveté about certain things to d
rop away and reveal the realism beneath. It kept not happening. Maybe it never would.

  “Shaun wants out of his parents’ house, which I assume means Georgia does too, since I can’t see those two ever splitting up,” I said. “They’re not going to go to an aggregator. Cuts profits, reduces control. They’re going to go independent. Watch. You’ll see baby bloggers going dark over the next few weeks as the Masons approach them.”

  Ben slanted a glance at his laptop, as if expecting an email to suddenly appear.

  This time, I did sigh. “They’re not going to hire us, Ben. We’re too much of a package deal, and we have too much of a reputation for getting stubborn when people don’t want us to tell the story the way we want to tell it. They may respect us professionally, but we’re not getting tapped for this one.” And privately, I liked it that way. If Shaun and Georgia Mason put together their online “dream team” by gutting the bottom levels of the world’s blog sites, all those people would enjoy long, lucrative careers as People Who Work For the Masons. I didn’t want that. I wanted my own byline, my own headlines, and I didn’t ever want to be in the position of putting my bosses’ needs before my own.

  Call me selfish if the label seems to fit, but I’ve had more than enough of people making my decisions for me and pretending that those choices were the right ones.

  Ben looked briefly disappointed before he shook his head, and said, “I guess you’re right. It still feels like we’re being left out of something amazing.”

  “Mmm,” I said, and took a swig of orange juice from the carton. Wiping my mouth, I suggested, “Give it a few days. I’ll post my footage of the zombies coming at us, say it took longer than expected to confirm the fence angle. Maybe we can go back, shoot in the field if the police don’t have it totally locked down, or just get some shots of the burn they’ve probably done by now. We can give this story new legs if we have to. It’s not like ‘oh no, there was a zombie’ is something that’s time-sensitive anymore.”